Fairy tales are great for so many things, I couldn’t even begin. But one of the best is how they blend the human and the animal. Humans and animals, in fairy tales, are constantly in close communion, helping and hindering each other, even changing places, with startling results. ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ for an obvious example. Helpful animals abound. My personal favorite is ‘The Emperor and the Nightingale’, where a bird helps the emperor back to life, while refusing to come to court. A great many unsung heroes of our own day are like that – helping others back to life, but refusing to be ‘honored’, if honor it can be called, at our own particular version of court.
So it isn’t surprising that this issue’s EAP contributors to ANIMAL DREAMS move dreamily in and out of the region of the human and the region of the beast. Tom Ball’s Talking Ape Man. Ever enigmatic contributor Jim Meirose’s How I Broke My Nose.
And then there’s my mother’s fairy tale at the end of her life, as she died, there was her memory of a dog as present to her then as he was to her as a child: Mudd (from “My Life with Dogs”).
Human animals in all their confused but well meaning glory show up in Cal LaFountain’s fascinating piece Exploring America’s Libraries, Churches, and Casinos. And Brian Griffith, as usual, gives us some hope in Africa’s Private Animal Worlds. David D. Horowitz put in a word for cats in Catalysts.
There are animals who warn us, if only we could listen. Listen, then, to poet David Selzer and his A Piecemeal Crisis.
Welcome back to our favorite translator of poetry, though usually the poems are his own. Charles S. Kraszewski returns with poems from two different poets: Foul weather (a parable), by Artur Grabowski. And the blooming meadows, by Jakub Pacześniak.
And as long as I’m passing out welcomes . . . welcome fall. And welcome back to you.